IPS on Firefox Opening Sound Device Issue

[Chris027]

Hi Guys - Our users are reporting a strange issue with Firefox loading IPS topics in the forum, activity stream, etc... There is a short delay where the mouse won't turn into a hand over links and it's like the page isn't loading correctly. Upon closer inspection, a user noticed Firefox was trying to open the sound card when loading an IPS page and there was contention causing it to freak out, thus the delay before things fully functioned. 

This is frequently noticed on the activity streams where people load it and go to click right away. 

I have all sounds disabled in IPS. 

Question: Why is IPS trying to open the sound card upon page load?

One specific user doesn't have notification sounds enabled but does have browser notifications enabled. 

Also note: If users open an audio app that takes exclusive control of the audio card, this issue doesn't happen.

[bfarber]

Quote

Question: Why is IPS trying to open the sound card upon page load?

The technicalities aren't too relevant (we don't outright try to access any specific hardware, however the way a user agent interprets things like creating a sound object could do so on a device).

I am not reproducing the issue you are describing (access the activity stream in Firefox, mouse over links, there is a delay before the page finishes rendering). Are you able to reproduce it on this community?

[Chris027]

17 hours ago, bfarber said:

The technicalities aren't too relevant (we don't outright try to access any specific hardware, however the way a user agent interprets things like creating a sound object could do so on a device).

I am not reproducing the issue you are describing (access the activity stream in Firefox, mouse over links, there is a delay before the page finishes rendering). Are you able to reproduce it on this community?

I can't reproduce it on any platform, including my own. However, our users say it only happens when they are logged into my site. They tried to activity stream here but because they were't logged in, nothing went wrong. this "must" mean it's related to user notifications somehow. 

[Chris027]

A user just reported this to me about the issue:

"changing the secret Firefox setting "dom.webaudio.enabled" to false makes it stop. Youtube still works."